They came to talk about how they market a nationwide festival without having any marketing budget. Their presentation was titled, "The Cherry Festival: Marketing on a Dime."

Trevor Tkach recently took over the Executive Director position, but he brings a wealth of experience from working there for four (4) years. Plus, he worked with the West Michigan Whitecaps minor league baseball team.

Susan Wilcox Olson has worked with the Cherry Festival for 23 years, and she has a load of war stories.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Craig Robinson of Qwaya. I am excited to include this post, because at this time, I do not have the background with using Facebook Ads to offer any legitimate insight. Craig is the editor for Qwaya (http://www.Qwaya.com), which offers a lot of opportunities for businesses to target their marketing to specific types of people using key valuable demographic data. I hope that you enjoy what Craig has to share.

With the meteoric rise of Facebook over the past few years, it’s fairly difficult to ignore the social site’s presence in the atmosphere of the Internet. It has influenced much of how businesses online operate in this day and age, and any business worth its salt will have at least a small Facebook presence to keep up with the brand name.

For small businesses in particular, Facebook provides an absolutely stellar opportunity to get some much needed recognition and to use your fan page as a marketing channel for your company. If done correctly, you should be able to pick up a wide number of fans and help to build your brand’s name over time.

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Most of the time, I try to provide to write based on my experiences--as a marketer. I have taught myself most of what I know through experience rather than formal education. So in many ways, I am like a wide-eyed baby, just learning everything as I go.

Is this really the best way to advertise a restaurant?

I try to share those experiences with you, because they're often interesting (or at least I think so :). Sharing these experiences with you also helps me take time to realize some things that I have learned. This is an important part of the learning process.

This time, however, I am bringing you an experience based on something, where I bring a WEALTH of experience.

I LOVE food! Generally, I'm willing to try just about any type of food, but I've had a love affair with food for years--too many years!

This morning, I was reading some advertisements within an unofficial visitor's guide, and I started noticing my own reactions to things.

I saw advertisements for many different things, but a couple of the ads caught my attention. These were restaurant advertisements, of course.

So I started to pay attention to the different advertisements. I realized that there were more restaurant ads than I noticed "naturally." I only saw them once I was looking for them, but there were a couple of ads I noticed "without trying."

What was the difference between the ads I noticed and the ads I did not notice?

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

How many times have you started read something, only to slap your head in disgust?

Yep! You fell for the title that matched your search, but that link just read a bunch of junk--just to get to the top?

Most of us know when we see junk, and many of us know that people write things for the Google robot. Google often encourages this, even though the people that run Google really don't want that to happen. Their search ranking algorithms encourage this type of behavior.

Craig Daitch has an impressive marketing background, but he also is known as a start-up junkie. When you try to get start-ups to be noticed by people who never heard of them, you have to be creative with your marketing.

Craig Daitch of Ford Motor Co. spoke at the AMA-SWMI Event on Thursday, May 17, 2012.

Craig describes himself as each an emerging media consultant, an agency innovation specialist, and a leading digital communication strategist. After hearing what he had to say, it's really tough to argue with him.

Craig quickly proved that he was NOT just another "me-too" guy reciting the same tired stuff about how to use social media. (Get Followers, Engage with your social media contacts, use all of the platforms, Your business can't survive if you aren't on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Pinterest/etc.)

Sunday, May 6, 2012

As many of you know, I am mostly new to social media. I'm "learning as I go," and I am sharing things as I am discovering them, even if many other people discovered around the same time that Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue (in 1492).

One of my newest revelations is pretty simple.

I've come to really like the Retweet option (Retweet button) on Twitter.